Far better off for who? People constantly dismiss spreadsheets, but in many cases, they are more powerful, more easily used by the people who have the domain knowledge required to properly implement calculations or workflow, and are more or less universally accessible.
Especially for collaboration, access controls, etc. Not to mention they could do with unit testing.
We had this decades ago, it was called dBase, but FoxPro (pre-Microsoft) was great too. Visual For Pro or MS Access were a brutal downgrade of every good aspect of it.
Imagine if today some startup offered a full-stack(TM) platform that included IDE, a language with SQL-like features, visual UI designer, database; generated small standalone binarires, was performant, and was smaller than most web homepages.
There are modern options, like Servoy or Lianja, but they're too "cloudy" to be considered equivalents.
Edit: seems like there's OpenXava too, but that is Java-based, too hardcore for non-professional programmers IMO. The beauty of xBase was that even a highschooler could whip out a decent business application if the requirements were modest.